Vaccinating nearly 8 billion people won't happen overnight. Bioethicists weigh in on the thorny issue of who should get the vaccine first -- and why.
that its committee will "develop an overarching framework to assist policymakers in the U.S. and global health communities."
"Internationally, there's a lot of talk about how every life is valuable," he said. "But that doesn't address what you do in practical terms if there's a shortage." "We need to think through how to distribute vaccines to reduce harm internationally," said Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "And some countries are really suffering more than others."Within the U.S., bioethicists hope that vaccines are distributed in a centralized and coordinated way.
Most of the experts had a set of categories in mind. Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law and director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown, helped draft policy papers on the issue for the Obama administration during the H1N1 crisis of 2009."That is, we might need a kind of ring vaccination strategy for major clusters of cases that don't we want to spread to other other cities or states," he said.
But given that nearly half of Americans have at least one chronic illness, there might need to be some consideration about who gets prioritized within that group. For instance, should immunocompromised patients in the midst of cancer treatment get access to the vaccine before tens of millions of people with Type 2 diabetes?
"A lot will depend on the vaccine, but also the modeling that we do," said Emanuel. "We might even find that the best way to reduce the spread of the virus is to vaccinate the most common transmitters, like grocery store workers or policemen," he said.
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